Ana Elena González-Treviño encourages us to think about Blake’s art graphically and, more specifically, topographically—though, to be clear, Blake’s topography is always multilayered such that place, gender, body, and history intertwine. González-Treviño reads Blake’s Thel as ‘probing...into the body of nature in order to acquire some sort of knowledge about nature and about herself’, a knowledge from which Thel recoils but that Oothoon seems prepared to engage. Inspired by folktales and mythical precursors to read how femininity is literally and figuratively entombed in the landscapes of both Thel and Visions, González-Treviño explores how both works stage ‘female desire and the legitimacy of intuitive knowledge, especially regarding the natural world’. And yet, for González-Treviño it is not simply that female characters in Blake are more ‘natural’; rather, if femininity does open up conduits to an encounter with radical materiality, these characters react with understandable anxiety after gazing upon the unveiled face of nature.

On 26 August 1913, Emma (Meg) Gehrts embarked on a one year journey to the German “Schutzgebiet” Togo. She accompanied the explorer and film‐maker Hans Schomburgk to perform the female lead in the first movie filmed on site with African supernumeraries, called “The White Goddess of the Wangora.” As the first European woman to set foot into many villages of the hinterland, her pale skin sent little children screaming, afraid of an ugly man‐eating monster. Gehrt’s travel journal has been lauded as one of the primary examples of German “humanistic” colonial literature, characterized by a growing respect of African peoples and their cultures. In contrast to this interpretation, this chapter argues that her text was in fact part of a multimedia complex (also including film and photographs) which was located in both, British and German colonial discourses alike. It sketched an intricate picture of the preconceptions, misunderstandings, and bargaining processes that structured the African‐German encounter.

The author identifies what she calls a ‘niche opening’ within the increasingly repressive policies of control and containment of refugees in the UK and wider Europe: refugee children. She engages with Western discourses about childhood and vulnerability to show how, unlike other asylum seekers, refugee children are approached by the UK asylum regime as subjects with ‘citizenship potential’. Within the wider context of hostility there have been ‘niche openings’ for certain categories of asylum seekers who have been looked on more favourably because they fit with certain moral and humanitarian values and aims of European nations. One of these niche openings has been for refugee children. While in the UK asylum seekers are judged as lacking citizenship potential and typically rejected through abandonment, confinement or expulsion, children are regarded as an investment in the future of the nation; to be moulded into model citizens through protection and guidance. This proximity to citizenship is, however, not only partial due to assumptions about refugee children’s lack of agency but also temporary as it gets abruptly interrupted as refugee youth age out of childhood.

Political scientists have conventionally distinguished between advanced liberal democracies; communist and post-communist states, and so-called third-world countries. Though used less frequently than was once the case, the groups or ones like them are distinguished because drawing general conclusions about the nature of political life requires being able to categorise in order to compare countries; and because, broadly speaking, the groups mark broad distinctions tending to correlate with a range of variables including political corruption. Placing, then, the liberal democracies of Western Europe in one category and the former communist countries of Europe, plus Russia, in another reveals that corruption is a larger problem in the latter part of the world than it is in the former. Against this background, the chapter looks at the historical context of corruption during the communist era. It then provides an overview of the extent of corruption in the post-communist era and of the variations in its extent between the states concerned –before explaining the distinctive reasons for the development of these levels of corruption, assessing their impact and looking at what is being done and needs to be done to reduce levels of corruption.

This chapter draws our attention to the complexities of protecting refugees and their rights within urban environments. As refugee crises become increasingly urbanised, protecting refugees becomes more complex. Unlike camp settings, urban environments are spatially fragmented and subject to various financial and political changes that are linked to, yet distinct from, those at the scale of the nation state. In cities in the Global South where much of urban displacement takes place, protecting refugees can be highly varied and subject to the whims of local communities and power brokers. Here, refugees share the same kinds of socio-economic struggles as the urban poor. Therefore, privileging one over the other can cause tensions and resentments among the local communities. The authors note that in such a condition, insisting on formulaic, rights-based approaches may be counter-productive. Rather, humanitarian organisations may benefit from working stealthily with local organisations, including state institutions, to insert protections for refugees into local by-laws. This may not be the model donors envision when funding humanitarian responses, but in an increasingly urban and dynamic world, there is a need to abandon earlier methods of protection and adopt tactics that tap into the needs and interests of local communities.

Chapter five moves out of the city to the countryside. Planners in Britain had long insisted that the concepts of town and country should be keep apart, but this division was recast by the threat and experience of air war, when urban and rural areas were redefined as evacuation and reception areas, respectively. Plans for ‘New Towns’ and industrial dispersal brought civilian and military planning imperatives together, while anxieties about threats to rural landscapes connected modern war to broader concerns about industrialisation and urbanisation. Sensitive to this, architects and planners debated how wartime camouflage techniques might be used in peacetime to limit the impact of industrial dispersal on rural scenes. The severe economic difficulties of post-war Britain, and the uncertainty over the possibility of any meaningful passive defence from nuclear weapons, meant that ambitious Cold War dispersal policies largely failed to take root. The chapter finishes with a case study of debates about the location of electricity stations which demonstrates the limits of these planning visions.

By exploring Mary Bridges Adams's politics and politicisation, this chapter shows the workings of a political life at local level in the context of war and peace. Mary's activism is quite lost to historical view in the popular histories, the 'myths' that Labour Party activists have internalised about their party's past. She represents the common, unnamed socialist woman who was anxious to identify herself with the cause of the working class. She always stressed the influence of William Morris, and she had a vision that socialism would end the poverty and suffering that working people faced, especially working-class children. During her Woolwich activism, there are shades of the ethical reformer who believed that art should be a central concern of education for all and wanted to change the workers' outlook to ensure they were better prepared for Utopia.